What’s the difference between an outcome, output and logic model?

July 30, 2008

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by tsne with a No license (All rights reserved) license.

Transcript: I’m probably one of the few people in the country who actually really likes logic models, because they bring a discipline to the work that you’ve said you’re doing or the assumptions you have about the strategies that you think are going to make a difference in people’s lives or in the communities that you’re in service to. And in the middle of the logic model are two things, and one is an output and one is an outcome, and they both flow from those strategies and activities.

So if you have a strategy, for instance, to provide a certain number of meals to help the homeless with issues of hunger, those meals are actually what’s called an output. It’s just a number of units that captures how many things of an activity or a service you’ve provided. When you do that provision of those meals, there’s a benefit to those homeless people, and that benefit might be that because they have nutrition, and they’re fed, they can do other things, like look for a job, look for permanent housing, because they have a basic need that’s been met — that is, getting some good nutrition. That good nutrition, and those other benefits — the job that they get, or the permanent housing that they find — those are the outcomes of that particular service. So, the output is the number of meals that are provided; the benefit to people is that they get more stabilized through something like permanent housing, or finding a job.